[iLemming]

Don't try to "learn Emacs". Grok the foundational layer - Lisp. Emacs is not an editor - it's first and foremost Lisp interpreter with a built-in editor. You need to get two things: REPL (evaluating Lisp expressions in-place) and structural editing (moving, expanding, transposing expressions).

You can start with vanilla Emacs with zero config and Claude/Copilot/Codex/etc, running separately. Your first goal is to have the LLM running inside Emacs - ask the LLM how. It probably will recommend gptel - as one of the most popular and robust choices, go with it.

Once you get LLM tools to modify Emacs state from within, you can just go crazy. You can tell it to change colors, fonts, ask any stupid questions, whatever. It will do it without losing a beat - no restarts, no waiting, no copy pasting - just flow.

[zingar]

How do you have the “modify LLM state from within” working? I can have it modify my config but I don’t know how to get it to eval and improve arbitrary elisp.

[iLemming]

gptel has the built-in tool to eval elisp, prompt the LLM to make changes in the active Emacs session and watch it do it.